"Rushkoff, Douglas - Cyberia" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rushkoff Douglas)

Posters still farther seem like aerial maps of the forest, seen from above.
The mathematician residing in this self-similar niche of academia and psychedelia is
Ralph Abraham, who broke through to Cyberia on his own, and in a very different manner.
He abandoned Princeton University in favor of U.C. Santa Cruz in 1968, during what he calls
the apex of the counterculture.'' It was while taking psychedelics in huge barn "be-ins'' with
his newfound friends that Abraham became familiar with what people were calling the
emotional reality'' of numbers, and this led him to the hills and caves of the Far East where
he spent several years meditating and hallucinating. On returning to the university and his
computer, he embarked with renewed vigor into hyperspace to churn out the equations that
explain his hallucinations and our existence.
While it seems so unlikely to the modern mind that psychedelics could contribute to
real progress in mathematics and science, cyberians, for the most part, take this connection
for granted. In the sixties,'' Abraham explains, "a lot of people on the frontiers of math
experimented with psychedelic substances. There was a brief and extremely creative kiss
between the community of hippies and top mathematicians. I know this because I was a
purveyor of psychedelics to the mathematical community. To be creative in mathematics, you
have to start from a point of total oblivion. Basically, math is revealed in a totally
unconscious process in which one is completely ignorant of the social climate. And
mathematical advance has always been the motor behind the advancement of consciousness.
What's going on now is at least as big a thing as the invention of the wheel.''
The brief kiss'' Abraham witnessed was the marriage of two powerful intellectual
communities, both of which had touched Cyberia--one theoretically and the other
experientially. And as cyberian mathematicians like Abraham tripped out further, they saw
how this kiss was itself a fractal event, marking a point in human history from which the
underlying shape or order of existence--the very "roughness'' of reality--could be inferred.
They had conceived and birthed their own renaissance.
Abraham has since dedicated himself to the implications of this rebirth. He sees the
most important, seemingly sudden, and non sequitur events in human history--of which the
kiss above is one--as part of an overall fractal curve. It's happened before. The Renaissance
was one. Christianity is one. The troubadors in the south of France; agriculture; the new
concept of time that came along with the Old Testament--they are all actually revivals. But
they are more than revivals. It's sort of a spiral model where there's a quantum leap to a new
level of organization and complexity.''
Today, Abraham is in his Santa Cruz office, wearing a sweatshirt, drawstring pants,
and Birkenstocks. He does not sport a slide rule or pocket protector. He is Cyberia's Village
Mathematician, and his words are reassuring to those who are living in a world that has
already taken this quantum leap. Just as the fractal enabled Mandelbrot to comfort IBM
executives about the ultimately orderly nature of their line interference, Abraham uses fractals
to show how this uncharted island in history on which we have found ourselves fits into a
larger picture.
There is this fractal structure of discontinuity. If you look at the biggest
discontinuities in human history, you will see they all seem to have very similar structures,
suggesting a mathematical model behind the evolution of civilization.''
Abraham argues that cyberian interest in the pagan, psychedelic, spiritual, and tribal is
not in the least contradictory to the advances in computer technology and mathematics.
Historically, he points out, renaissance periods have always involved a resurgence of archaic
elements along with the invention of new technologies and mathematical systems. The success
of Cyberia, according to the bearded technosage, will depend on our ability to put these
disparate elements together. We have emphasized integration and synthesis, trying to put
everything together in one understanding, using mathematical models only as one tool. We